Hey there! Thanks for all the great hits on the site! I was amazed to see that today there were so many, the stats were literally off the chart.
Well, I'm not sure why RebeccaHousel.com has become so popular, but I wanted to thank you, whoever you are, for checking in!
Tonight I just had a little inspiration to write...not that I need inspiration. Writing is like breathing. I can't NOT do it. While this may seem like a blessing, I've sometimes felt the weight of it like a burden you can't put down.
I've struggled mightily with this...this seemingly involuntary reflex. I hoped to choose my own path in life and made amazingly good attempts at doing so. But no matter how hard I fought against being a writer, I always ended up with the proverbial pen in my hand. It got so bad at one point, I even believed that my body kept escaping accidental death (at least six times over the last four decades) because I hadn't yet written what I was put on this earth to write. And that may yet prove to be true. Though I certainly hope not. My silly strings of sentences aren't that meaningful.
I feel a bit like Oedipus sometimes, not that I'm marrying my mother and killing my father anytime soon, but Oedipal in the way that no matter how much distance I attempted to put between me and my awful destiny, every effort I made to move further away only brought me closer. Now, I'm here. Staring destiny in the face. How often do we recognize this moment in our lives?
I haven't lived long enough yet to really know. I can only say that looking destiny in the face after atttempting to evade it for all these years is scary as hell. Luckily, I'm Jewish--hell isn't our thing really. It's all about interpretation--or, the journey.
You may think that if you looked destiny in the eye, you'd go for it--you'd just do it--like the famous Nike commercial. It's the same sort of feeling people have about precognition--like if they knew without a doubt what was going to happen next, they'd do things differently. It's not true--you wouldn't...and I suspect, too, that you couldn't.
While Relativity and Special Relativity would seem to support the theory of destiny to some degree, Quantum Mechanics throws that right out the window. It's simply not possible to predict the destiny of any subatomic particle--because the possibilities, the potential, is inifinite. Scary, isn't it? We humans feel like those subatomic particles--like anything is possible--as though we have no limits. But we do. We're confined to space therefore, we have limits. And therefore, we are susceptible to destiny.
So while the fact that writing has basically haunted me my whole life for some purpose I have yet to discover, it seemed as though I was able to make choices to stall that destiny. "Seemed" is the key word there.
I think that's what's bothered me all along. We think of destiny as a manifest of God's design, or a larger universal pattern--we tend to consider the concept through a positive lens. But why? We have no idea who's pushing the buttons and why. That concerns me. If destiny is real, and if choice is simply an illusion, that means that we are pawns, puppets--the image of the gods moving us around on some giant chess board comes to mind.
When I turned 35, I began to have a series of life epiphanies. It was wild. I was able to reflect on so much in what basically amounted to about 18 years of adulthood. None of those epiphanies dealt with destiny however. And more's the shame.
So here I am, at a crossroads (and we all know who waits at the crossroads, don't we?). It is apparent to me that the universe is hard set on my fulfilling this destiny and that I won't be able to do anything else until I face my fears and just do it.
Just do it. Sounds simple. But I have this creeping feeling that it's anything but. Especially with writing. Especially mine. There's weight to this alright, a great weight. Every word is heavier than the next. Am I strong enough? I'm not sure that question is relevant but part of the journey is about asking such questions. I hope to find the answers.
May the Fates be with you on your journey, marching bravely toward your destiny.... March on, my friends, march on!
Rebecca
Well, I'm not sure why RebeccaHousel.com has become so popular, but I wanted to thank you, whoever you are, for checking in!
Tonight I just had a little inspiration to write...not that I need inspiration. Writing is like breathing. I can't NOT do it. While this may seem like a blessing, I've sometimes felt the weight of it like a burden you can't put down.
I've struggled mightily with this...this seemingly involuntary reflex. I hoped to choose my own path in life and made amazingly good attempts at doing so. But no matter how hard I fought against being a writer, I always ended up with the proverbial pen in my hand. It got so bad at one point, I even believed that my body kept escaping accidental death (at least six times over the last four decades) because I hadn't yet written what I was put on this earth to write. And that may yet prove to be true. Though I certainly hope not. My silly strings of sentences aren't that meaningful.
I feel a bit like Oedipus sometimes, not that I'm marrying my mother and killing my father anytime soon, but Oedipal in the way that no matter how much distance I attempted to put between me and my awful destiny, every effort I made to move further away only brought me closer. Now, I'm here. Staring destiny in the face. How often do we recognize this moment in our lives?
I haven't lived long enough yet to really know. I can only say that looking destiny in the face after atttempting to evade it for all these years is scary as hell. Luckily, I'm Jewish--hell isn't our thing really. It's all about interpretation--or, the journey.
You may think that if you looked destiny in the eye, you'd go for it--you'd just do it--like the famous Nike commercial. It's the same sort of feeling people have about precognition--like if they knew without a doubt what was going to happen next, they'd do things differently. It's not true--you wouldn't...and I suspect, too, that you couldn't.
While Relativity and Special Relativity would seem to support the theory of destiny to some degree, Quantum Mechanics throws that right out the window. It's simply not possible to predict the destiny of any subatomic particle--because the possibilities, the potential, is inifinite. Scary, isn't it? We humans feel like those subatomic particles--like anything is possible--as though we have no limits. But we do. We're confined to space therefore, we have limits. And therefore, we are susceptible to destiny.
So while the fact that writing has basically haunted me my whole life for some purpose I have yet to discover, it seemed as though I was able to make choices to stall that destiny. "Seemed" is the key word there.
I think that's what's bothered me all along. We think of destiny as a manifest of God's design, or a larger universal pattern--we tend to consider the concept through a positive lens. But why? We have no idea who's pushing the buttons and why. That concerns me. If destiny is real, and if choice is simply an illusion, that means that we are pawns, puppets--the image of the gods moving us around on some giant chess board comes to mind.
When I turned 35, I began to have a series of life epiphanies. It was wild. I was able to reflect on so much in what basically amounted to about 18 years of adulthood. None of those epiphanies dealt with destiny however. And more's the shame.
So here I am, at a crossroads (and we all know who waits at the crossroads, don't we?). It is apparent to me that the universe is hard set on my fulfilling this destiny and that I won't be able to do anything else until I face my fears and just do it.
Just do it. Sounds simple. But I have this creeping feeling that it's anything but. Especially with writing. Especially mine. There's weight to this alright, a great weight. Every word is heavier than the next. Am I strong enough? I'm not sure that question is relevant but part of the journey is about asking such questions. I hope to find the answers.
May the Fates be with you on your journey, marching bravely toward your destiny.... March on, my friends, march on!
Rebecca
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